Posts by an account I follow is not seen

[vrthra]

I have followed an account https://mas.to/@xdevroey in a mastodon server some time back. I am currently noticing that I do not see the posts from that account. That is, in my timeline, I searched when that account made a post (https://mas.to/@xdevroey/109518474341803906), and I do not see that post any time until now (7 hours later).

[toddsundsted]

@vrthra unfollow and follow again as a first step—sometimes people explicitly accept follow requests and are slow about it, and sometimes instances stop sending. however beyond that my first step is always to search the log file (for "109518474341803906" in this case for example) to see if the the message was sent but not processed for some reason, or not sent at all. you're looking for a log message in the console with that id and with message content identical to that of their post on their server, and some indication of a problem (a stack trace). there are a bunch of reasons posts fail that i've seen, all the way up to problems with ssl certificates.

i can search for both that person and that post on my instance, so it's unlikely processing is the problem, but it's the fediverse so there's always little surprises. (it's worth searching for that post yourself, as well.)

if you can look at that person's followers on their instance you can always doublecheck that you're in the list. related to that, when you follow someone, you expect to see an "Accept" message come back in the logs. if auto-accept is on and their server isn't backlogged with messages to send, it should show up within seconds at most. in your case it would look something like:

2022-12-06T00:07:39.348968Z   INFO - {"@context" => "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams", "id" => "https://mas.to/users/xdevroey#accepts/follows/252926", "type" => "Accept", "actor" => "https://mast.to/users/xdevroey", "object" => {"id" => "https://gopinath.org/activities/1e_lZmpoA4A", "type" => "Follow", "actor" => "https://gopinath.org/actors/rahul", "object" => "https://mas.to/users/xdevroey"}}

if you see it, then your follow was successful. if you do not, then they didn't accept you follow or their server is slow at sending it for some reason.